While that seems like a step in the right direction, not everyone is in a celebratory mood. The Parliament’s decision failed to include an amendment that proposed a cut on the use of biomass sourcing and biofuel use, which a number of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) supposedly support.

The authors argued that the EU’s insistence “that biofuels are carbon neutral” mistakenly presupposed that forest regrowth can adequately make up for emissions from bioenergy production and combustion. “The neutrality assumption is not valid because it ignores the transient, but decades to centuries long, increase in CO2 caused by biofuels,” the study concluded.

Emissions Are Emissions

With the EU ranking third among the world’s biggest greenhouse gas emitters, behind only China and the United States, this mistaken notion about biomass could prove fatal to the continent’s efforts to reduce CO2 levels to meet the Paris Climate Agreement’s targets. The short-term increase in CO2 from biofuels could jeopardize the EU’s current goal of cutting emissions by at least 40 percent in 2030 compared to 1990 levels.

“A molecule of CO2 emitted today has the same impact on the climate whether it comes from coal or biomass,” study author John Sterman, the Jay W. Forrester professor of management at the MIT Sloan School of Management, told Renewables Now. “Declaring that biofuels are carbon neutral, as the EU, UK, and others have done, erroneously assumes forest regrowth happens quickly and fully offsets the emissions from biofuel production and combustion.”

“Enabling the combustion of roundwood [full trees] for energy production creates a climate-harming carbon debt for decades to come,” he told Nature. “That is a conceptual error that runs counter the climate-mitigation goals of Europe’s renewable-energy plans.”

The EU’s decision, however, is not yet enforceable. The EU Parliament still needs to negotiate the plan with national governments and the EU Council, which just set a 27 percent renewable energy target for 2030 in December. These negotiations could address the dangers of biofuels while leaving the 30 percent renewable energy target intact.

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